I haven't used my Eee 701 since "upgrading" to an Eee 901 over 6 months ago. I decided I wanted to turn it into a RADIUS server for my wireless network, and thought OpenBSD would be the perfect OS for that. I have an external USB DVD drive for the Eee, so I burned the install45.iso to a CD-RW and boot from it.

I'm following along the install guide, and everything goes along fine until step 4.5.5 - Choosing installation media. When prompted to chose the location of the sets, this is what I get:

Notice there is no cd option, even though I'm booting from a CD. If I chose the default disk option, I then get:

Is the disk already mounted? [no]
Available disks are: wd0 sd0.
Which one contains the install media? (or 'done') [wd0]

Since wd0 is the drive I'm installing to, I type in sd0, and then it says:

No file systemsfound on sd0

If I try the default option [wd0], no surprise, it says device is busy. If I say yes when asked if the disk is mounted, it prompts me for the path to the sets, but I don't know what to put there since I don't know where the CD is mounted.

I haven't used my Eee 701 since "upgrading" to an Eee 901 over 6 months ago.

I assume you are saying that you upgraded the BIOS to that of the 901. Although I have seen a lot of anecdotal stories on the Internet of people "saying" this works, I am not convinced. I have a 701 Surf which was only upgraded to the 703 BIOS (which appears to be the last supported BIOS for the 701..), & I have had no problems.

Quote:

Now what do I do?

Booting from bsd.rd (as the install does...) is the first major step, however if the install later complains that no filesystem is found, this can be due to two reasons:

The BIOS is not translating correctly to the solid-state storage.

The MBR and/or disklabels were not correctly initialized.

Various suggestions:

You may want to consider downgrading back to the 703 BIOS.

When I have done new installations, I have always done so through USB flash drives. Instructions for creating a bootable USB stick can be found at the following:

It appears, also, that the cd drive is bootable by the BIOS, but not recognizable by the bsd.rd kernel. I would reboot the ramdisk kernel, select the shell, and examine the dmesg(8). My guess is that there is no "cd0" drive defined.

It's more likely he meant that he "upgraded" to a new laptop, and hasn't been using his older 701 model.

You are correct. I have two Eee's, the 701 and the 901. I have not used the 701 since I got the 901. I don't even think it's possible to use a BIOS for the 901 on the 701 since it's completely different hardware.

I don't know if I'll be able to mess with it tonight, but since it's seeing wd0 and an sd0, when the only drives on the system are the internal 4GB SSD and the external DVD, I was thinking it was somehow recognizing the DVD drive as sd0.

I'm guessing that "uhub0: device problem, disabling port 2" is why it's not seeing the CD after boot. I'm going to try coping the 4.5/I386 directory to my USB drive and see if it will copy the install files from it.

It installed fine using the CD I already burned with install45.iso and copying the 4.5/I386 directory to my USB drive. When I selected disk, sd0, it found the packages in the 4.5/I386, but complained that there was no INSTALL.i386 file and asked if I wanted to continue anyway. It installed anyway, or so it seems, but there is an INSTALL.i386 in the directory it claims there isn't.

I'm going to re-install though, this time with cd45.iso burned on the CD and the packages on my USB drive.